Matt Yglesias

The Revolutions of 1989

It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I was interested to learn while in the former East Germany, that in the GDR economic system being a waiter was considered a very desirable job. It was apparently disorienting for some ambitious young East Germans who’d achieved the dream of waiterdom to discover that this is a low-status position in a market economy. The guy I heard about this from at greatest length made the transition okay, however, and now works in PR for Volkswagen.

Late-GDR life is the subject of two excellent films, Good Bye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others, that everyone should see. I’m not really clear how representative daily life in the GDR was of everyday existence in other Eastern Bloc countries, but since as far as I know there aren’t excellent movies about daily life in Communist Poland or Communist Bulgaria this is probably how we’ll remember things.

Charles Kenny has written a very interesting paper on the Soviet bloc’s economic performance.

Something remarkable to keep in mind about the Revolutions of 1989 is how peaceful they were—triumphs of people power and courageous non-violent resistance on the part of populations, aided by a late-Communist leadership that in the end mostly chose to do the right thing and give up rather than go down in a wave of bloodshed. With the exception of Romania and Yugoslovia, regimes that ruled by force and violence were not, themselves, brought down by force and violence. A lot of somewhat odd happenstance was involved in the happy ending of the Cold War in Germany, but as the pattern was largely repeated elsewhere I think perhaps it shouldn’t be chalked up to fluky contingencies.

War Plan Red

Spencer Ackerman recounts some thinking about the prospect of leaked plans for a U.S. military effort to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal:

I had a conversation yesterday with a U.S. official who shared with me the gossip that shpilkis roiled the lower intestines of other officials who were awaiting Sy Hersh’s newest New Yorker piece. Huh, I said, what’s it about? My interlocutor hadn’t seen it yet, but rumors traveled: it seemed to concern possible U.S. plans to secure Pakistani nuclear weapons.

My source sighed in frustration. Why was Hersh writing this stuff, if he was in fact writing it? We probably have plans to invade, I don’t know, Canada, my interlocutor continued, since we plan for fucking everything on the planet, and so reporters of Hersh’s stature ought to be able to distinguish between what’s purely hypothetical and what’s real. And now what do we do? We have to say WE HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE IN THE PAKISTANIS TO SAFEGUARD THEIR NUKES when no sane human being has *total confidence*. But if they don’t hear that, all this ill will built up from the Kerry-Lugar-Berman missteps and the Waziristan operation and the drones and all the rest will boil over, and we’ll be digging ourselves out of this for weeks…

This turns out to not really be what Hersh’s piece is about. That said, this seems like as good a time as any to talk about War Plan Read, the 1920s-vintage US military plan for an invasion of Canada:

The scenario envisioned involved the U.S. going to war with Britain, and thus attacking Canada as the most realistic short-term way to damage the empire. The important thing was to seize the ports in Atlantic Canada to prevent re-enforcement from Britain of Canadian forces, or resupply of Britain by resource-rich Canada. In probably the most exciting scenario, the Red-Orange plan, we were fighting a British-Japanese alliance. Canada in turn had “defense scheme one.”

Harry Turtledove’s American Empire series envisions a world in which Confederate victory in the Civil War leads to a geopolitical order in which the rump United States is aligned with Germany against a Britain/France/Confederacy/Japan alliance in two world wars.

After the Wall

Fred Kaplan explains the forgotten history of Berlin crises during the Cold War and ends on a familiar note:

Remains of the Berlin Wall (my photo, available under cc license)

The wall was built to bottle up an incipient revolt—a mass emigration that threatened to expose the Soviet system as inferior to the West, as an oppressive dungeon that its most educated young people yearned to escape. The wall not only blocked those yearnings; it also made clear to the brighter young Soviet and Eastern European leaders that the system itself—the ideological basis of their rule—was suspect, that it could not be sustained, much less compete with the West, without the internal imposition of force.

It’s interesting to reflect that it’s very much still the case that millions of people living in Ukraine and Russia and for that matter Mexico and Mozambique would love to engage in mass emigration to the West and expose the systems under which they live as corrupt and uncompetitive. Indeed, according to Gallup 700 million people would like to migrate permanently to a new country:

But of course the voters of the United States and Canada have no intention of letting as many people show up as might like to come, and the voters of Western Europe have even less desire for this, and those of Japan even less.

Did Financial Innovation Cause Deng Xiaoping’s Economic Reforms?

Eugene Fama makes a curious claim on behalf of financial innovation since 1980:

But suppose we buy into the more common negative current view of finance. There is still a big open question. Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It’s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth. Despite any role of finance in the current recession, are the market naysayers really ready to argue that worldwide wealth would be higher today if financial markets and financial institutions didn’t develop as they did?

A banker in Frankfurt put this same point to me, apparently believing it’s a brilliant argumentative trump card. In reality, it’s a bit nuts—it’s relying on a post-1980 boom that didn’t happen. The United States didn’t start growing faster in 1980:

The claim you’re supposed to make on behalf of the post-1980 US economy isn’t that it’s grown faster (it hasn’t!) but that it’s been less variable than was growth in the early postwar decades. That’s why the term “Great Moderation” was termed. Except in the wake of the current bust, it’s clear that no such decrease in variation was actually achieved. Growth has been the same as it was before, and yet median income growth has been substantially slower. In Europe and Japan growth post-1980 has been much worse than growth was in the previous decades.

The place where growth really has been much better since 1980 than it was before is China. This is not a fact to be neglected. Chinese growth has been very rapid, and very consistently maintained. And a very large number of people live in China, people who started this process being very poor. The past 30 years’ worth of economic growth in China have done an enormous amount to improve human welfare.

But the cause of this turnaround pretty clearly wasn’t financial deregulation in the developed world. It was policy shifts in China—the process, commenced by Deng Xiaoping, of moving away from central planning and joining the global economy. This doesn’t strike me as even remotely debatable. When we look at impressive growth over the past 30 years were looking at policy shifts in China, the success of container shipping, and to an extent shifts in developed world trade policy.

Update Paul Krugman brings a better chart "From Angus Maddison’s dataset": Finance doesn't deserve the credit for the post-1980 growth acceleration in the developed world because no such acceleration happened.

Celebrating 120 Years of North Dakota

States of America. Given that more people live in Memphis, TN than North Dakota it might seem unfair that this large and essentially empty patch of land gets two senators. When you consider that even mighty South Dakota has fewer people than Jacksonville, Florida and that the two states combined contain considerably fewer people than live in Queens or the Virginia Beach / Norfolk / Newport News metro area then it starts to seem even stranger that there are actually two Dakotas. Why would you do it that way?

The answer, it turns out, is cynical partisan politics. The Dakota Territory was extremely favorable to the Republican Party, so the GOP made it into two states.

The Lessons of History

Spencer Ackerman observes the influence the lessons of Iraq are having on American operational thinking:

Second, yes, again: assuming what “worked” in Iraq will “work” in Afghanistan is to delude yourself, and to do so deliberately. Everyone says that he or she is not simply applying role lessons from one war to a different one, but I see more evidence, on balance, that that’s exactly what’s happening. How many times did I hear at the Marine Corps University’s COIN conference last month about what the lessons of Iraq were and how experience showed this-or-that. And that’s natural! You want to apply the benefit of experience — that’s what smart people do. But it’s also fraught with peril, and we all need to be rigorous here about checking our assumptions.

I think appeals to “the lessons of history” are, in general, dangerous. Efforts to make predictions based on observations of human history tend to fail. But it’s especially difficult when you’re basically talking about learning lessons based on a single case.

Pining for the Crackpots of Yore

David Boaz reminds us of an anniversary:

Forty-five years ago yesterday, the actor Ronald Reagan gave a nationally televised speech on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater. It came to be known to Reagan fans as “The Speech” and launched his own, more successful political career. [...] Would that the current assault on economic freedom would turn up another presidential candidate with Reagan’s values and talents.

Goldwater was running on a strong platform of opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s agenda with regard to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and thus assembled the following impressive political coalition:

In the speech, Reagan warned that Johnson’s plans to reduce poverty were doomed:

Now—so now we declare “war on poverty,” or “You, too, can be a Bobby Baker.” Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we’re spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have—and remember, this new program doesn’t replace any, it just duplicates existing programs—do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic?

Fortunately, Johnson was re-elected and implemented policies that led to large reductions in the poverty rate:

As you can see, the decline in the poverty rate was most significant among senior citizens. A sign that outside the “war on poverty” per se, other elements of the Johnson agenda like expansion of Social Security (Reagan and Goldwater proposed privatizing it, saying we should “introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused”) and the creation of Medicare. Reagan had warned in 1961, of course, that creating Medicare would lead to tyranny and in the speech Boaz so admires denounced it as a scheme of “forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program.” When implemented, of course, Medicare proved so popular and effective that Reagan didn’t dare touch it during his eight years in the White house.

He also warned that re-electing Johnson would lead to the triumph of global Communism:

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

As it happens, of course, the Johnson administration did make some very serious errors in foreign policy, but they were the reverse of the errors Reagan was warning about. On domestic policy, there were certainly some ideas that didn’t work well. What’s more, though the federal government was not involved in urban crime control policy in a major way, the school of thought to which the architects of Kennedy-Johnson domestic policy belonged made a major error of undue complacency in the face of rising levels of violent crime. But all things considered the record in terms of expanded access to education and health care, racial equality, and poverty reduction looks extremely strong. And, of course, no tyranny emerged! Eventually the Great Society liberals became unpopular and were turned out of office by conservatives who offered a considerably more moderate program than Goldwater’s 1964 agenda.

The Truth About Zora Neale Hurston

Damon W. Root at Reason pretty convincingly argues that African-American involvement in the mainstream conservative movement has somewhat deeper roots than I said here. He cites this Saturday Evening Post article from author Zora Neale Hurston, who was apparently a Robert Taft supporter in ‘52 and New Deal hater:

Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes. If the average American had been asked flatly to abandon his rights as a citizen and to submit to a personal rule, he would have chewed tobacco and spit white lime. But under relief, dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the “Little White Father,” more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on an on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few. The change from a republic to a dictatorship was imperceptibly pushed ahead.

Seeing as how Hurston is a mainstay of high school curricula, it seems like there should be more awareness of these facts about her perspective. Obviously she was unrepresentative of black opinion during that period, but it’s interesting history.

Booker T. Washington and the Black Conservative Tradition

Reading Steven Hahn on Booker T. Washington, I kept thinking that the effort to re-evaluate Washington’s career would benefit from the concept of a “black conservative” political tradition that Ta-Nehisi Coates deployed in his profile of Bill Cosby. To the Google I went and wasn’t surprised to see that Coates had written as much already back in March, reviewing the same book Hahn was reviewing.

At any rate, I think it’s an important idea—the kind of thing that seems obviously correct once you understand it but that, to me at least, was totally unfamiliar until I heard it. But the basic point is that within the African-American political tradition, like within the white political tradition, there’s a conservative strain and a liberal strain. The conservative strain is pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic in its orientation, whereas the liberal strain is optimistic, cosmopolitan, and integrationist. But because this controversy within black politics is embedded inside a larger white-dominated political context it often gets confused. Sometimes, as in the conventional reading of Washington, the black conservative appears to white American liberals to be the timid appeaser of white supremacists. And other times, as with a Malcolm X, he looks like a dangerous radical black nationalist.

It’s only extremely recently that the idea of an African-American aligning himself, à la Clarence Thomas, with the mainstream conservative movement in America could be remotely possible. But even so, that didn’t mean there was no ideological conflict in black politics or that general rightist sentiments somehow didn’t exist.

Was Irving Kristol a Neocon?

Nathan Glazer has an article about Irvin Kristol in TNR that, on its second page, makes the interesting argument that Kristol, despite being the “grandfather of neoconservatism,” didn’t actually hold the beliefs about national security policy that we now identify with that term:

Irving found the limitation of The Public Interest to domestic affairs confining and founded The National Interest, recruiting the wonderful Owen Harries from Australia to edit it and hoping it would provide a platform for a more realistic (I think that is the term he favored) approach to foreign policy. Oddly enough, such an approach was in contradiction with what came be known as “neoconservative” foreign policy: Irving was skeptical early on about imposing or promoting democracy in South Korea or Vietnam (he was wrong about South Korea), and, undoubtedly, he would have been equally skeptical about its prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The term “neoconservatism” was hijacked. In its early application, in the 1970s, it referred to the growing caution and skepticism among a group of liberals about the effects of social programs. It was later applied to a vigorous and expansionist democracy-promoting military and foreign policy, especially in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was some reason to the hijacking–after all, a second generation of “neoconservatives,” some of it literally second-generation, was promoting this policy. But some of us who were labeled early as neoconservatives, a characterization not of our choosing, such as Daniel P. Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and myself, found it astonishing and unsettling.

Justin Vaïsse takes a more scholarly approach and reaches a similar conclusion in an FP article written about a month ago. I think this conclusion is pretty hard to square with the final five grafs of Kristol’s article on the “neoconservative persuasion” in the August 2003 Weekly Standard.

I think the way you put this together is with the observation that even though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.

The Great Gamble

Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan is the kind of book you read to feel worse about the idea of escalating the US troop deployment to Afghanistan. But it mostly made me feel better. You read something like this and you really are struck by all the parallels to our current predicament. But at the same time you’re also really struck by the extent to which the situations tend to be parallel, but not at all the same in terms of their quantity.

The Soviets, like the Americans, had some trouble understanding Afghan situations on their own terms in part because the Soviet government (like the American government) understood its role in the world in grandiose, highly ideological, propagandistic terms. But while the shape of the problem was comparable, the extent of it really isn’t. The US isn’t even close to being as ideological or propagandistic as the Soviet one. And it’s like this down the list. The Pakistan border situation is a problem for us, but was a disaster for them. The mujahedeen ideological coalition was broader than the one we’re facing, they were better-funded than the people we’re facing. We’re much richer than the Soviets were, have much better techology (consider how much richer and more technologically adept we are in 2009 than we were in 1979), have way more international legitimacy, more allies, more of everything. The only advantages the Soviets had relative to us are more straightforward supply lines and the mixed blessing of being able to play cute games with all-Muslim units from the Soviet ’stans.

This is important because if you read the book you’ll a point Steve Coll has been pressing—for all their errors, what the Soviets were doing really kinda sorta worked in the end. Najibullah’s government survived Soviet withdrawal and even slightly outlasted the Soviet Union itself. If we push the parallel but assume the United States of America continues to exist, things could look very different.

The one doubts-raising parallel is that the Soviets put almost laughably little thought into why this was important before they invaded. They never asked pro-Soviet forces in Afghanistan to mount a coup, and there was no real reason to think that the coup failing would damage their interests in any way. The invasion became a disaster not so much because the Soviets weren’t able to succeed in a satisfactory way, but because keeping the war up was so costly in times of money, personnel, attention, prestige, etc. while the US countermeasures were very cheap. Which is to say that something can be doable and also not necessarily be worth doing. But a lot of the debate has focused on whether or not the kind of mission General McChrystal has proposed is even possible, and I think the Soviet experience should increase, rather than decrease, our confidence that it is.

In particular, it’s hard to capture the full scope of this in the blog post, but the Soviet war in the early phases was dominated by really nutty operational conduct. For example, they opened their intervention on behalf of the pro-Soviet Afghan government by shooting the leader of the pro-Soviet Afghan government and replacing him and everyone in his regime by leaders of a rival Communist faction. Obviously, that set a bad tone for the whole thing, but somehow they convinced themselves that this move would be welcomed by the local population. I could go on.

Counterterrorism Through Air Power

(RAF Photo)

Interesting early precedent for the recent drone campaign waged by US forces in South Asia from the Royal Air Force’s history:

March – May 1925- Outrages by Mahsud tribesmen in Waziristan, India, see the RAF involved in its first independent air action. Aircraft from Nos. 5, 27 and 60 Squadrons, commanded by Wing Commander RCM Pink, bomb and strafe mountain strongholds in a successful attempt to crush the rebellion. On 1 May, the rebel leaders seek an honourable peace, and the short campaign known as “Pink’s War” came to a close. A campaign in 1919 had proved inconclusive after causing 1,329 casualties; this latest action results in the loss of just 2 men.

We generally call them “Mehsud” tribesmen now, and notwithstanding the ’success’ the RAF had in putting down the rebellion it continues to be the case that the central governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan have little effective authrority over them. These days, though, the Pakistani military is working with one Mehsud faction (the Abdullah Mehsud group) against the faction led first by the late Baitullah Mehsud and now by Hakimullah Mehsud.

Afghanistan’s Era of Peace and Stability

In his latest policy paper for CNAS, Andrew Exum makes a claim I’ve heard increasingly frequently from COIN fans, namely:

An Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors is not the ahistorical fantasy some critics would like the public to believe. Until the Marxist coup of 1978, Afghanistan was at peace for half a century – an anomaly among Asian states in the 20th century. Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.

This is to some extent a matter of interpretation, but here’s a bit of an Afghan history timeline:

1929 – Amanullah flees after civil unrest over his reforms.

1933 – Zahir Shah becomes king and Afghanistan remains a monarchy for next four decades.

1953 – General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister. Turns to Soviet Union for economic and military assistance. Introduces a number of social reforms, such as abolition of purdah (practice of secluding women from public view).

1963 – Mohammed Daud forced to resign as prime minister.

1964 – Constitutional monarchy introduced – but leads to political polarisation and power struggles.

1973 – Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and declares a republic. Tries to play off USSR against Western powers. His style alienates left-wing factions who join forces against him.

During the period of peace, in other words, one kind was driven from power by civil unrest, Mohammed Daud served as de facto dictator two separate times, the country shifted from Non-Aligned to Soviet-Aligned and then back again. What’s more, the ‘73 Daud coup didn’t come out of nowhere:

Between 1969 and 1973, instability ruled Afghan politics. The parliament was lethargic and deadlocked. Public dissatisfaction over the unstable government prompted growing political polarization as both the left and the right began to attract more members. Still personally popular, the king nevertheless came under increasing criticism for not supporting his own prime ministers.

Obviously, pre-1978 Afghanistan was considerably more stable than Afghanistan has been for the past 30 years. But that’s a low bar, and it seems to me that there was considerable turmoil throughout the entire post-WWII era.

Soviet GDP in the 1970s

Last night I was reading Gregory Feiler’s very interesting book The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (short summary: conquering Afghanistan is hard and expensive) and read the following bit of potted history:

After the Czechoslovakian reform movement knows as “socialism with a human face” was crushed along with the Prague Spring in 1968, Brezhnev’s renure developed into what became known as zastoi—the stagnation. The economy, beset by massive inefficiencies from central planning and institutions such as Stalin’s agricultural collectivization, declined more or less consistently, and was further dragged down by a ballooning military-industrial complex overseen by Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov.

My previous understanding of this had been that zastoi referred to political and cultural developments, not economic ones, and that actually the 1970s were a pretty good era in economic terms. After all, the Soviet Union, like today’s Russia, was a major oil and gas producer and tended (like today’s Russia) to do well whenever oil was expensive. That appears to be the story told by actual Russian GDP statistics:

You can see that the Soviet Union was, in fact, pretty dysfunctional by the fact that when the oil boom ended it pretty much flatlined. But for the bulk of the Brezhnev era, the economy seems to have been in okay shape. I note that there’s a certain amount of post-1991 revisionism on this general subject. The whole reason the Cold War happened was that the Soviet Union was not just morally awful (North Korea’s morally awful too) but also reasonably formidable. Its economy performed a lot worse than America’s but better than a lot of other countries. They had a giant military, an impressive space station, etc., to go along with the political repression and brutal domination of foreign countries. That’s what was scary about the whole thing. More recently we’ve taken to letting ourselves be frightened by really puny countries (Iran, Venezuela, etc.) and to some extent people seem to be projecting that backwards onto a much more substantial past adversary.

Reading Material

No pho in Afghanistan

I find the idea that senior military and civilian policymakers are debating what to do in Afghanistan primarily by reading different books about Vietnam depressingly plausible. But there’s really something quite perverse about the American tendency to want to turn every conversation about every military engagement into a rehash of debates about Vietnam.

I’ll note in particular that hawks’ obsession with Lewis Sorley’s A Better War is pretty pathological. Whether or not you buy what Sorley is saying about military operations in Vietnam, you can understand the war on a strategic level without ever worrying about Creighton Abrams. Vietnam wasn’t, after all, an abstract exercise in U.S. military prowess. It was part of the Cold War. The hawks’ claim was that Communist victory in Vietnam would imperil the credibility of US commitment to key allies in Europe and Japan and set off a “domino effect” that threatened US national security. The doves said that was dumb, and Communist victory in Vietnam would have no dire geopolitical consequences.

We left Vietnam, and the doves were proven utterly and completely right about the main strategic issue.

Meanwhile, it’s really not clear that thinking about Vietnam can tell us anything at all about Afghanistan. And not just because the countries are different but because the situations are so different. I’ve been reading about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which is at least the same country, but the presence or absence of superpower competition makes an enormous difference.

CIA Blocking Access to Lee Harvey Oswald Files

I try really hard not to be a JFK assassination theorist, but the CIA is not really helping matters:

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.

It’s extremely hard to believe that 40 year-old documents would compromise present-day operational security. It’s also elementary public choice reasoning to understand that the CIA is going to be inclined to massively overstate its need to keep things secret. Presumably they’re just trying to cover up some minor source of institutional embarrassment rather than concerned that these files reveal that Oliver Stone was right all along. One way or another, people should see these files.

Rep. Shadegg Warns of “Soviet-Style Gulag Health Care”

Not content with out of control Hitler analogies, Rep John Shadegg (R-AZ) took to the floor yesterday to demonstrate that he’s a fool. Lee Fang has the quotes:

SHADEGG: You know, it occurs to me, and I’ll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we’re really getting here is we’re not just getting single-payer care. We’re getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care [...] It appeared in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. You can Google it. You can pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel. You can ask her about Soviet-style gulag health care in America, where powerful politicians protect their constituents.

Lee reminds us that “The Soviet gulags were a network of prisons and forced labor camps that held as many as 20 million people during Stalin’s reign of terror.” To compare a set of insurance regulations you happen not to favor to Stalin’s mass imprisonment and slaughter is ridiculous, and absurdly insensitive to the real victims.

Massive human rights violations aside, I would also note that health care was among the strong points of the Soviet economy, along with primary and secondary education, armaments, and mass transit.

Putting Relative Decline in Perspective

I found a lot to like in Roger Cohen’s latest column, but I did think his point that Barack Obama is “setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline” could use a bit of perspective.

If what you mean by relative economic power is America’s share of global output, then it’s important to recognize that we’ve been in a state of decline ever since the mid-1940s. In 1946, almost every industrialized nation on earth lay in a state of rubble and the US was something like half of world output. We’ve been declining, in relative terms, ever since. The other thing that’s happened is that countries have split and recombined in different ways. The Soviet Union was a much larger country than Russia, dividing it up into pieces made us look relatively bigger. At the same time, Western European countries have started to agglomerate. If you think that alongside the US, Japan, and China the world’s other major economy is Germany then we look a lot bigger than Germany. But if you think that it should be the European Union, the US, Japan, and China then we’re quite a bit smaller than the EU. Or if you want to make it the Eurozone, rather than the EU as a whole, then we’re slightly smaller. But of course in terms of political power the EU doesn’t have the kind of decision-making mechanism that can transform the large scope of its economy into strategic influence.

That leaves you with Japan, relative to whom we’re getting stronger, and China. China is important, but it’s still basically a country full of impoverished people. And even when you lump them all together, the total is much, much smaller than ours. In other words, insofar as we’re losing relative economic power this is mainly a result of already-rich European countries becoming more coordinated in their activities. Where they’re very coordinated, they’re very powerful—their central bank probably matters more than ours at this point. But where they’re not coordinated, things are much as they’ve been for decades and the US is by far the world’s leading power.

The Continuum of Muslim Opinion

Thomas Friedman offers us a little schematic:

Second, in this war on terrorism, there is no “good war” or “bad war.” There is one war with many fronts, including Europe and our own backyard, requiring many different tactics. It is a war within Islam, between an often too-silent Muslim mainstream and a violent, motivated, often nihilistic jihadist minority. Theirs is a war over how and whether Islam should embrace modernity. It is a war fueled by humiliation — humiliation particularly among young Muslim males who sense that their faith community has fallen behind others, in terms of both economic opportunity and military clout. This humiliation has spawned various jihadists cults, including Al Qaeda, which believe they have the God-given right to kill infidels, their own secular leaders and less pious Muslims to purify Islam and Islamic lands and thereby restore Muslim grandeur.

This is an interesting idea, but doesn’t common sense suggest a much more complicated situation in which Muslim opinion exists along a pretty broad continuum. There’s a huge conceptual space between wanting to “embrace modernity” in a way that a secular American Jew like Friedman or I would have amenable (after all, the Republican Party doesn’t meet that standard) and wanting to roam around the world killing everyone in the name of purifying Islam. If the entire Muslim world were governed by rights-respecting democracies it might be relatively easy to draw clear lines between dangerous violent people, and people just advancing a conservative political agenda. But that’s not the situation that exists, so you have a muddle of different actors who embrace violence to differing degrees against different targets and for different purposes.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s probably helpful to think about the wave of “propanaganda of the deed” terrorist attacks in the late 19th century. Alexander II, President of France Sadi Carnot, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, US President William McKinley, Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolyin, Spanish Prime Minister José Canalejas, and King George I of Greece were all killed between 1881 and 1912 by anarchists. And that’s to say nothing of various failed assassination attempts, random bombings, etc. It was a big problem at the time. And Europe was chock-a-block with left-wing political movements at the time ranging from the ancestors of modern-day Social Democratic parties to the Bolsheviks. Simply expressing a desire for real political democracy counted as a radical left-wing stance in most of Europe. At the time you could place people on a continuum of violence and radicalism, but it would have been hard to simply draw a line and say “here’s the war, go fight the bad guys.” And in retrospect, of course, nobody talks about anarchist violence because a then-obscure Russian splinter group wound up taking over a major country and killing dramatically more people than the anarchists ever had.

Health Care in 1500

Points for blood-letting, Hans von Gersdorff (surgeon), Field book of wound medicine, 1517

This morning I went to the Stockholm Stadsmuseum where they had, among other things, an unremarkable little diorama showing pre-modern health care as practiced in Sweden. Lot pre-modern health care elsewhere in Europe it involved a lot of bloodletting and other bogus practices based on a completely wrongheaded understanding of how disease works.

This is all pretty well-known as a matter of history and science. But it occurred to me that it’s perhaps something worth thinking about in the context of modern health care debates. After all what typically happens when the technology for doing something doesn’t exist is that it just doesn’t get done. People started buying radios when people learned to build radios that worked. Why were all these people buying health care services that didn’t improve health? And what would a health reform debate in 1500 look like? On the one hand, I guess you’d have liberals saying it was really unfair that poor people couldn’t get health care and advocated for taxes and a regulated list of covered services to which everyone was entitled. And on the other hand you’d have free market economists saying that this interference in the market was a terrible idea, was going to lead to rationing, would stifle innovation, etc. Somewhere you’d have a 16th century Shannon Brownlee protesting that actually the doctors were just killing people with their leeches, but nobody would listen to her.

Now obviously modern medicine’s not the same as that. But whatever elements of human psychology—some combination of wishful thinking plus Robin Hanson’s point that we spend on health care for relatives not only because we care but also to show we care—created a viable market in non-cures are still with us. And that’s got to be an important factor in why it’s hard to design satisfactory health care systems. It’s noteworthy when you compare what different countries do that there’s enormous diversity in policy while the diversity in actual outcomes is hard to find and hard to measure.

20 Years Ago

Neil Sinhababu on Hank Paulson:

During the 2008 portion of the financial crisis, I really came to appreciate the Hank Paulson story. He’s an old-fashioned captain of industry who would’ve fit perfectly in the Republican elite before they went Fox News crazy. I wouldn’t want him writing labor law or setting capital gains taxes, but he accepts that humans are causing global warming and has donated over $100 million to the Nature Conservancy.

I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a huge Paulson fan, but it is worth keeping this sort of thing in mind when you marvel at the ability of Fox News Conservatism to do things like take Van Jones’ scalp. Check out the electoral coalition the right was able to put together in 1988, before the dawn of the Fox News Era:

Vermont. Connecticut. New Jersey. California. I can’t describe conservative messaging circa 1988 in great detail, but whatever it was it was much more effective than what they have today. And they didn’t even have raw material like “black guy with a Muslim name” to work with.

The Fate of the Kerry Administration

Tyler Cowen doesn’t have an answer to this question from a reader:

I love when you think through counterfactuals, so here’s one that’s been on my mind. Imagine John Kerry wins in 2004. What are the implications for the 2006 midterms and more importantly the 2008 presidential election? We probably pull out of Iraq without ever attempting the surge, and leave the country in chaos. But more importantly, the housing bubble collapses on a Democrat’s watch, not [a] Republican’s. Regardless of what anyone says, the housing bubble was going to burst. Maybe the collapse takes a different path under Kerry than Bush, but it still happens, leaving his administration to deal with it. Does he win re-election? Is McCain still the Republican candidate? And what becomes of a little known back bencher named Barack Obama?

For starters, I’m pretty sure this is wrong on Iraq. If you go back to what John Kerry was saying in 2004, and what key Kerry advisers thought in 2004, I think it’s very likely that we would have seen a surge much earlier—in 2005—before Iraq entered the big deterioration that really took place in 2006. The consequences of that for the course of events in Iraq are hard to predict.

Domestically, for his first two years President Kerry would be facing off against a GOP-controlled congress so I think we should expect that nothing noteworthy would have happened. But Democrats would still have been well-positioned for gains in 2006, and I think we should expect a lot of progressive success on small-bore legislative initiatives in 2007, though there would still be way too many Republican Senators for giant reforms. It’s a bit hard to imagine President Kerry stopping the housing bubble from building and then busting. We would presumably have had a much larger stimulus in 2008 with probably more efforts at direct relief for homeowners. Still, even if those policies worked relative to baseline, the situation would still have been deteriorating as we headed into campaign season and Kerry would almost certainly have lost.

To whom? I think it’s hard to imagine John McCain winning the nomination without the odds of Republicans retaining the White House looking very bleak. With the odds of a GOP win looking good in our counter-factual, they would go with a paint-by-numbers candidate like Mitt Romney. There would be a lot of talk about the “Mormon factor” perhaps undermining fundamentals-based models of election outcomes, but the final result would exactly mirror the fundamentals-based models, which would be attributed to the brilliance of Romney’s campaign strategy. Barack Obama would still be considered a rising star, and progressives would tell themselves that if only Kerry had been as charismatic as Obama we might have had more success—he’d be well-positioned for a 2012 faceoff with Hillary Clinton, once revelations of his extramarital affair killed former Vice President John Edwards’ hopes at the nomination.

The Secret History of Medicare

The overwhelming conventional wisdom about health care reform is that if reform is defeated in 2009, it’ll stay defeated for a good long time. Proponents won’t just be able to regroup twelve months later, make their case again, wage another election, and bring it back up in the next congress. I don’t particularly question that wisdom, but it is worth noting that this “get it right the first time” approach to legislative change is at odds with the way past major health reforms got done. Here, via David Leonhardt, is how we got Medicare:

— In 1960, as a Senator and Presidential candidate, John F Kennedy backs a Medicare legislative proposal that falls four votes short in the Senate.

— In 1962, now-President Kennedy backs Medicare in a State of the Union address and a 20,000 mass rally in Madison Square Garden simulcast on three television networks; the bills falls short by two votes.

— The bill is reintroduced in 1963 after the midterms and dies again.

— In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was able to ride the sympathy wave to pass the Civil Rights Act, but Medicare still couldn’t pass.

— In 1965, Medicare finally passes following a landslide election.

This is just totally different from the “win an election, try at reform, and if you fail give up for 20 years” model that Bill Clinton pursued and that people generally seem to feel applies in the Obama era. Instead, the fight went on-and-off for five years across three different elections and a presidential assassination. The idea was that reformers had a proposal that they thought was a good idea and that they thought was a popular idea; when they lost they didn’t blame themselves for having failed to persuade the opposition to stop opposing reform, they blamed the opposition and tried to win the next election.

Of course this doesn’t work if you get crushed in the midterm elections.

Buchanan’s Apologia for Hitler

As if some neocon were setting out to parody dovish thinking on contemporary issues, paleocon Pat Buchanan has gone and written a “blame Britian first” account of the origins of World War II. Apparently, according to Buchanan, Hitler was just seeking to unify the German-speaking people in one country by annexing Danzig and had no intention of fighting a wider war:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

This last line is the giveaway. After all, it’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to obtain lebensraum was long at the center of his thinking. That’s why Generalplan Ost was prepared in the early years of the war and called for German occupation of vast swathes of Soviet territory. The answer to Buchanan’s riddle of how Hitler intended to invade Russia when Russia and Germany were separated by Poland is, of course, that Hitler intended to conquer Poland, the very thing that Buchanan is perversely trying to deny he intended to do.

The real question for Buchanan is why, if Hitler had no intention of marching through Poland into Russia, did he follow up his conquest of Poland by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invading Russia? The answer, of course, is that Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe and the western USSR from the beginning.

I think that if you want to try to run the case against World War II, your best route is not to deny that Hitler wanted war with Poland and Russia. You should deny that Hitler wanted war with Britain and France for any reason other than to secure his western flank against the USSR. Then you can say the western powers should have just let Hitler and Stalin fight it out and prepare for a Cold War-style campaign of containment against the eventual winner. I think for that to be even remotely persuasive requires you to import a lot of 20/20 hindsight about the Cold War into 1939, but it’s not nearly as ludicrous as this “Hitler was just misunderstood” theory.

Reading Comprehension and the WSJ

The Wall Street Journal opinion section publishes some truly odd material, but rarely have I seen anything as odd as this op-ed from Allan Meltzer which appears to be primarily founded on an inability to comprehend the meaning of the term “since”:

Day after day, economists, politicians and journalists repeat the trope that the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression. Repetition may reinforce belief, but the comparison is greatly overstated and highly misleading. Anyone who knows even a bit about the Great Depression knows that this is false.

The facts we face today are very different than the grim reality Americans confronted between 1929 and 1932. True, this recession is not over. But it would have to get improbably worse before it came close to the 42-month duration of the Great Depression, or the 25% unemployment rate in 1932. Then, the only safety net was the soup line.

To say that the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression just doesn’t mean that the current recession is as bad as the Great Depression. It means that the current recession is worse than all the recessions that came after the Great Depression. And Meltzer’s own chart clearly shows that this is correct. The other bad post-Depression recessions were 1973-75 and 1981-82. We’ve already exceeded both in terms of duration and decline in industrial production, and the unemployment rate seems likely to eventually peak above 81-82 levels. The only way to introduce ambiguity into this claim is to pretend not to understand that “Great Depression” refers to the entire period from the beginning of the crisis in 1929 all the way until the war-induced recovery in the 1940s. Everyone uses the term this way.

If you pretend not to understand this, you can hive off the recession-within-the-depression of 1937-38 as a very bad “post-Depression” recession. But what’s the point? I don’t even really understand how throwing smoke in readers’ eyes about this is supposed to advance the WSJ’s political agenda. It’s just nonsense.